Entered, she has mostly given something
up: to Adonis, the king, the coronation, the decapitation for which she
is then blamed; she has given up a dividing line between her and him. Entered,
she then finds out what it is to be occupied: and sometimes the appropriate
imagery is of evil and war, the great spreading evil of how soldiers enter
and contaminate. In the words of Marguerite Duras, "evil is there,
at the gates, against the skin." 14
It spreads, like war, everywhere: "breaking in everywhere, stealing,
imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled . . . a prey to the intoxicating
passion of occupying that delightful territory, a child's body, the bodies
of those less strong, of conquered peoples." 15
She is describing an older brother she hates here ("I see wartime
and the reign of my elder brother as one" 16).
She is not describing her lover, an older man fucking an adolescent girl.
But it is from the sex that she takes the texture of wartime invasion and
occupation, the visceral reality of occupation: evil up against the skin--at
the point of entry, just touching the slit; then it breaks in and at the
same time it surrounds everything, and those with power use the conquered
who are weaker, inhabit them as territory.

Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited,
a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been
no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes
hurry, yes more. Having a line at the point of entry into your body that
cannot be crossed is different from not having any such line; and being
occupied in your body is different from not being occupied in your body.
It is human to experience these differences whether or not one cares to
bring the consequences of them into consciousness. Humans, including women,
construct meaning. That means that when something happens to us, when we
have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them, some significance
that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny
and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct
meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were
a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans
assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here
on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On
the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy;
we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives
us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength
of tempered steel. The measure of women's oppression is that we do not
take intercourse--entry, penetration, occupation--and ask or say what it
means: to us as a dominated group or to us as a potentially free and self-determining
people. Instead, intercourse is a loyalty test; and we are not supposed
to tell the truth unless it compliments and upholds the dominant male ethos
on sex. We know nothing, of course, about intercourse because we are women
and women know nothing; or because what we know simply has no significance,
entered into as we are. And men know everything--all of them--all the time--no
matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are. Anything
men say on intercourse, any attitude they have, is valuable, knowledgeable,
and deep, rooted in the cosmos and the forces of nature as it were: because
they know; because fucking is knowing; because he knew her but she did
not know him; because the God who does not exist framed not only sex but
also knowledge that way. Women do not just lie about orgasm, faking it
or saying it is not important. Women lie about life by not demanding to
understand the meaning of entry, penetration, occupation, having boundaries
crossed over, having lesser privacy: by avoiding the difficult, perhaps
impossible (but how will we ever know?) questions of female freedom. We
take oaths to truth all right, on the holy penis before entry. In so doing,
we give up the most important dimension of what it means to be human: the
search for the meaning of our real experience, including the sheer invention
of that meaning-- called creativity when men do it. If the questions make
the holy penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers might do? Experience
is chosen for us, then, imposed on us, especially in intercourse, and
so is its meaning. We are allowed to have intercourse on the terms
men determine, according to the rules men make. We do not have to have
an orgasm; that terrible burden is on them. We are supposed to comply whether
we want to or not. Want is active, not passive or lethargic. Especially
we are supposed to be loyal to the male meanings of intercourse, which
are elaborate, dramatic, pulling in elements of both myth and tragedy:
the king is dead! long live the king!--and the Emperor wears designer jeans.
We have no freedom and no extravagance in the questions we can ask or the
interpretations we can make. We must be loyal; and on what scale would
we be able to reckon the cost of that? Male sexual discourse on the meaning
of intercourse becomes our language. It is not a second language even though
it is not our native language; it is the only language we speak, however,
with perfect fluency even though it does not say what we mean or what we
think we might know if only we could find the right word and enough privacy
in which to articulate it even just in our own minds. We know only this
one language of these folks who enter and occupy us: they keep telling
us that we are different from them; yet we speak only their language and
have none, or none that we remember, of our own; and we do not dare, it
seems, invent one, even in signs and gestures. Our bodies speak their language.
Our minds think in it. The men are inside us through and through. We hear
something, a dim whisper, barely audible, somewhere at the back of the
brain; there is some other word, and we think, some of us, sometimes, that
once it belonged to us.

There are female-supremacist models for intercourse that
try to make us the masters of this language that we speak that is not ours.
They evade some fundamental questions about the act itself and acknowledge
others. They have in common a glorious ambition to see women self-determining,
vigorous and free lovers who are never demeaned or diminished by force
or subordination, not in society, not in sex. The great advocate of the
female-first model of intercourse in the nineteenth century was Victoria
Woodhull. She understood that rape was slavery; not less than slavery in
its insult to human integrity and human dignity. She acknowledged some
of the fundamental questions of female freedom presented by intercourse
in her imperious insistence that women had a natural right--a right
that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself--to be entirely self-determining,
the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined
the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what
the sex is and will be. Her thinking was not mean-spirited, some silly
role reversal to make a moral point; nor was it a taste for tyranny hidden
in what pretended to be a sexual ethic. She simply understood that women
are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse because of the nature of the
act--entry, penetration, occupation; and she understood that in a society
of male power, women were unspeakably exploited in intercourse. Society--men--had
to agree to let the woman be the mind, the heart, the lover, the free spirit,
the physical vitality behind the act. The commonplace abuses of forced
entry, the devastating consequences of being powerless and occupied, suggested
that the only condition under which women could experience sexual freedom
in intercourse--real choice, real freedom, real happiness, real pleasure--was
in having real and absolute control in each and every act of intercourse,
which would be, each and every time, chosen by the woman. She would have
the incontrovertible authority that would make intercourse possible:

To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination.
When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce
follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the
ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect
this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman
be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for
existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased
a hundred-fold . . . 17

The consent standard is revealed as pallid, weak, stupid,
second-class, by contrast with Woodhull's standard: that the woman should
have authority and control over the act. The sexual humiliation of women
through male ownership was understood by Woodhull to be a concrete reality,
not a metaphor, not hyperbole: the man owned the woman's sexual organs.
She had to own her sexual organs for intercourse to mean freedom for her.
This is more concrete and more meaningful than a more contemporary vocabulary
of "owning" one's own desire. Woodhull wanted the woman's desire
to be the desire of significance; but she understood that ownership of
the body was not an abstraction; it was concrete and it came first. The
"iniquity and morbidness" of intercourse under male dominance
would end if women could exercise a materially real self-determination
in sex. The woman having material control of her own sex organs and of
each and every act of intercourse would not lead to a reverse dominance,
the man subject to the woman, because of the nature of the act and the
nature of the sex organs involved in the act: this is the sense in which
Woodhull tried to face the fundamental questions raised by intercourse
as an act with consequences, some perhaps intrinsic. The woman could not
forcibly penetrate the man. The woman could not take him over as he took
her over and occupy his body physically inside. His dominance over her
expressed in the physical reality of intercourse had no real analogue in
desire she might express for him in intercourse: she simply could not do
to him what he could do to her. Woodhull's view was materialist, not psychological;
she was the first publisher of the Communist Manifesto in the United
States and the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street. She saw sex the
way she saw money and power: in terms of concrete physical reality. Male
notions of female power based on psychology or ideas would not have addressed
for her the real issues of physical dominance and power in intercourse.
The woman would not force or rape or physically own the man because she
could not. Thus, giving the woman power over intercourse was giving her
the power to be equal. Woodhull's vision was in fact deeply humane, oriented
toward sexual pleasure in freedom. For women, she thought and proclaimed
(at great cost to herself), freedom must be literal, physical, concrete
self-determination beginning with absolute control of the sexual organs;
this was a natural right that had been perverted by male dominance--and
because of its perversion, sex was for women morbid and degrading. The
only freedom imaginable in this act of intercourse was freedom based on
an irrevocable and unbreachable female will given play in a body honestly
her own. This was an eloquent answer to reading the meaning of intercourse
the other way: by its nature, intercourse mandated that the woman must
be lesser in power and in privacy. Instead, said Woodhull, the woman must
be king. Her humanity required sexual sovereignty.

Male-dominant gender hierarchy, however, seems immune
to reform by reasoned or visionary argument or by changes in sexual styles,
either personal or social. This may be because intercourse itself is immune
to reform. In it, female is bottom, stigmatized. Intercourse remains a
means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating
to her cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her, burning
it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushing and thrusting
until she gives up and gives in-- which is called surrender in the
male lexicon. In the experience of intercourse, she loses the capacity
for integrity because her body--the basis of privacy and freedom in the
material world for all human beings--is entered and occupied; the boundaries
of her physical body are--neutrally speaking-- violated. What is taken
from her in that act is not recoverable, and she spends her life--wanting,
after all, to have something--pretending that pleasure is in being reduced
through intercourse to insignificance. She will not have an orgasm--maybe
because she has human pride and she resents captivity; but also she will
not or cannot rebel--not enough for it to matter, to end male dominance
over her. She learns to eroticize powerlessness and self- annihilation.
The very boundaries of her own body become meaningless to her, and even
worse, useless to her. The transgression of those boundaries comes to signify
a sexually charged degradation into which she throws herself, having been
told, convinced, that identity, for a female, is there-- somewhere beyond
privacy and self-respect.

It is not that there is no way out if, for instance,
one were to establish or believe that intercourse itself determines women's
lower status. New reproductive technologies have changed and will continue
to change the nature of the world. Intercourse is not necessary to existence
anymore. Existence does not depend on female compliance, nor on the violation
of female boundaries, nor on lesser female privacy, nor on the physical
occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a source of sexual
pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression
of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires
no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating
the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile,
formal expression of men's contempt for women; but that contempt can turn
gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew
intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for
men; this is the essential truth of pornography. So freedom from intercourse,
or a social structure that reflects the low value of intercourse in women's
sexual pleasure, or intercourse becoming one sex act among many entered
into by (hypothetical) equals as part of other, deeper, longer, perhaps
more sensual lovemaking, or an end to women's inferior status because we
need not be forced to reproduce (forced fucking frequently justified by
some implicit biological necessity to reproduce): none of these are likely
social developments because there is a hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed,
mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion.
Reproductive technologies are strengthening male dominance, invigorating
it by providing new ways of policing women's reproductive capacities, bringing
them under stricter male scrutiny and control; and the experimental development
of these technologies has been sadistic, using human women as if they were
sexual laboratory animals--rats, mice, rabbits, cats, with kinky uteri.
For increasing numbers of men, bondage and torture of the female genitals
(that were entered into and occupied in the good old days) may supplant
intercourse as a sexual practice. The passion for hurting women is a sexual
passion; and sexual hatred of women can be expressed without intercourse.

There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all
the biological arguments that supposedly predetermine the inferior social
status of women. Bulls mount cows and baboons do whatever; but human females
do not have estrus or go into heat. The logical inference is not that we
are always available for mounting but rather that we are never,
strictly speaking, "available." Nor do animals have cultures;
nor do they determine in so many things what they will do and how they
will do them and what the meaning of their own behavior is. They do not
decide what their lives will be. Only humans face the often complicated
reality of having potential and having to make choices based on having
potential. We are not driven by instinct, at least not much. We have possibilities,
and we make up meanings as we go along. The meanings we create or learn
do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable ideas. Our meanings also exist
in our bodies--what we are, what we do, what we physically feel, what we
physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from
what the body has learned about life. Yet when we look at the human condition,
including the condition of women, we act as if we are driven by biology
or some metaphysically absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our possibilities
because we refuse to honor the potential humans have, including human women,
to make choices. Men too make choices. When will they choose not to despise
us?

Being female in this world is having been robbed of the
potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does not make
choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and
values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment
of a wide- ranging capacity for choice. Objectification may well be the
most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, especially as it exists
in relation to intercourse. The surrender occurs before the act that is
supposed to accomplish the surrender takes place. She has given in; why
conquer her? The body is violated before the act occurs that is commonly
taken to be violation. The privacy of the person is lessened before the
privacy of the woman is invaded: she has remade herself so as to prepare
the way for the invasion of privacy that her preparation makes possible.
The significance of the human ceases to exist as the value of the object
increases: an expensive ornament, for instance, she is incapable of human
freedom--taking it, knowing it, wanting it, being it. Being an object--living
in the realm of male objectification--is abject submission, an abdication
of the freedom and integrity of the body, its privacy, its uniqueness,
its worth in and of itself because it is the human body of a human being.
Can intercourse exist without objectification? Would intercourse be a different
phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorter or longer, happier
or sadder; more complex, richer, denser, with a baroque beauty or simpler
with an austere beauty; or bang bang bang? Would intercourse without objectification,
if it could exist, be compatible with women's equality--even an expression
of it--or would it still be stubbornly antagonistic to it? Would intercourse
cause orgasm in women if women were not objects for men before and during
intercourse? Can intercourse exist without objectification and can objectification
exist without female complicity in maintaining it as a perceived reality
and a material reality too: can objectification exist without the woman
herself turning herself into an object--becoming through effort and art
a thing, less than human, so that he can be more than human, hard, sovereign,
king? Can intercourse exist without the woman herself turning herself into
a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must
fuck: because one price of dominance is that one is impotent in the face
of equality?

To become the object, she takes herself and transforms
herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even
in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she
physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck. It is especially in the
acceptance of object status that her humanity is hurt: it is a metaphysical
acceptance of lower status in sex and in society; an implicit acceptance
of less freedom, less privacy, less integrity. In becoming an object so
that he can objectify her so that he can fuck her, she begins a political
collaboration with his dominance; and then when he enters her, he confirms
for himself and for her what she is: that she is something, not someone;
certainly not someone equal.

There is the initial complicity, the acts of self-mutilation,
self-diminishing, self-reconstruction, until there is no self, only the
diminished, mutilated reconstruction. It is all superficial and unimportant,
except what it costs the human in her to do it: except for the fact that
it is submissive, conforming, giving up an individuality that would withstand
object status or defy it. Something happens inside; a human forgets freedom;
a human learns obedience; a human, this time a woman, learns how to goose-step
the female way. Wilhelm Reich, that most optimistic of sexual liberationists,
the only male one to abhor rape really, thought that a girl needed
not only "a free genital sexuality" but also "an undisturbed
room, proper contraceptives, a friend who is capable of love, that is,
not a National Socialist . . . " 18
All remain hard for women to attain; but especially the lover who is not
a National Socialist. So the act goes beyond complicity to collaboration;
but collaboration requires a preparing of the ground, an undermining of
values and vision and dignity, a sense of alienation from the worth of
other human beings--and this alienation is fundamental to females who are
objectified because they do not experience themselves as human beings of
worth except for their value on the market as objects. Knowing one's own
human value is fundamental to being able to respect others: females are
remade into objects, not human in any sense related to freedom or justice--and
so what can females recognize in other females that is a human bond toward
freedom? Is there anything in us to love if we do not love each other as
the objects we have become? Who can love someone who is less than human
unless love itself is domination per se? Alienation from human freedom
is deep and destructive; it destroys whatever it is in us as humans that
is creative, that causes us to want to find meaning in experiences, even
hard experiences; it destroys in us that which wants freedom whatever the
hardship of attaining it. In women, these great human capacities and dimensions
are destroyed or mutilated; and so we find ourselves bewildered--who or
what are these so-called persons in human form but even that not quite,
not exactly, who cannot remember or manifest the physical reality of freedom,
who do not seem to want or to value the individual experience of freedom?
Being an object for a man means being alienated from other women--those
like her in status, in inferiority, in sexual function. Collaboration by
women with men to keep women civilly and sexually inferior has been one
of the hallmarks of female subordination; we are ashamed when Freud notices
it, but it is true. That collaboration, fully manifested when a woman values
her lover, the National Socialist, above any woman, anyone of her own kind
or class or status, may have simple beginnings: the first act of complicity
that destroys self-respect, the capacity for self-determination and freedom--readying
the body for the fuck instead of for freedom. The men have an answer: intercourse
is freedom. Maybe it is second-class freedom for second-class humans.

What does it mean to be the person who needs to have
this done to her: who needs to be needed as an object; who needs to be
entered; who needs to be occupied; who needs to be wanted more than she
needs integrity or freedom or equality? If objectification is necessary
for intercourse to be possible, what does that mean for the person who
needs to be fucked so that she can experience herself as female and who
needs to be an object so that she can be fucked?

The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance
is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation
(having less freedom is degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of
responsibility absolutely and thus commits herself to her own continuing
inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the demands of
the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life
around meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization
on earth: she takes on the burden, the responsibility, of her own submission,
her own objectification. In some systems in which turning the female into
an object for sex requires actual terrorism and maiming--for instance,
footbinding or removing the clitoris-- the mother does it, having had it
done to her by her mother. What men need done to women so that men can
have intercourse with women is done to women so that men will have intercourse;
no matter what the human cost; and it is a gross indignity to suggest that
when her collaboration is complete-- unselfconscious because there is no
self and no consciousness left--she is free to have freedom in intercourse.
When those who dominate you get you to take the initiative in your own
human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet has
ever gotten back. Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom; and if it
cannot exist without objectification, it never will be. Instead occupied
women will be collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other
collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority;
calling intercourse freedom. It is a tragedy beyond the power of language
to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard
of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality,
it will have to survive-- on its own merits as it were, having a potential
for human expression not yet recognized or realized--the destruction of
male power over women; and rape and prostitution will have to be seen as
the institutions that most impede any experience of intercourse as freedom--chosen
by full human beings with full human freedom. Rape and prostitution negate
self-determination and choice for women; and anyone who wants intercourse
to be freedom and to mean freedom had better find a way to get rid of them.
Maybe life is tragic and the God who does not exist made women inferior
so that men could fuck us; or maybe we can only know this much for certain--that
when intercourse exists and is experienced under conditions of force, fear,
or inequality, it destroys in women the will to political freedom; it destroys
the love of freedom itself. We become female: occupied; collaborators against
each other, especially against those among us who resist male domination--the
lone, crazy resisters, the organized resistance. The pleasure of submission
does not and cannot change the fact, the cost, the indignity, of inferiority.